After he’d finished his meal, as though putting down his bowl was a silent signal, other residents of Rabbit’s Mound came over, singly and in pairs, occasionally accompanied by children, to be introduced. Gabriel did his best to greet them politely, struggling to remember names with the faces. But once warm, fed, and dried, exhaustion set in, and when a yawn escaped him, practically cracking his jaw, the old man who’d been recounting a story of the early days of the town stopped, then slapped a surprisingly strong hand on his shoulder.
"And there's the hind leg of a donkey talked off, just like my momma warned."
Gabriel felt himself blushing. "I'm sorry, I—"
"No, no, you're a guest and we’re showing pitiful hospitality, jawing at you while you’re nearly dead on your feet."
He looked around the hall, summoning Henry back from where he was talking with another man. Gabriel noted that most of the folk had cleared their tables and left, only a few adults and the scattering of dogs remaining.
"Your boy needs his bed," the old man said to Henry. Gabriel might have been offended at the demotion to boy at his age, but they both had at least a decade on him, and likely more, so he let it pass.
"Too late to try and foist you onto someone," Henry decided. "We've not guesthouses as such, but there's a loft over where we left your beast, should be dry and warm and comfortable enough if you don't mind the smell of horse and hay. You being a Rider, I'm suspecting you don't."
He did not.
They said goodnight to the older man and walked back to the shed, where Henry pointed out the ladder to the loft, and left him with a promise of a fresh-cooked breakfast in the morning.
The other horse had been taken somewhere while they were eating dinner, and Steady seemed almost pathetically glad to see him, shoving his blunt head against Gabriel's shoulder, then lipping at his hair.
"Stop that, you idiot." Gabriel ran a hand through his hair and grimaced at the slight slobbers that came away in his fingers. "Look like they took good care of you." There was fresh water in the trough, and the remains of grain, and Steady had that sleepy look in his eye he got after a full meal. "Not your usual accommodations, hey? Not mine either, truth be told. But it seems well enough, and it's dry, which is more than I was expecting a few hours ago."
He gave the horse another once-over with his hands, making sure there wasn't any swelling or lumps he might've missed when unsaddling him earlier.
"All right, you look fine. I'm going to crawl up there," and he jerked a thumb at the ladder built into the wall, "and get some shuteye. Anyone comes knocking, probably best you don't trample them, okay?"
The loft wasn't quite high enough for him to stand upright, with an unprotected edge overlooking the lower level that gave him pause, but there was a small oil lamp that cast a pleasant glow, and the floor was layered with more worn rugs for sleeping, with room for him to stash his pack and lay out his bedroll.
"I need to find out what they're wanting for one of these rugs," he said, pulling off his boots and settling in for the night. "Maybe two." Never mind that carrying one would be useless excess, even if he’d kept the mule.
Comfortably settled, Gabriel turned down the lamp and closed his eyes. The events of the past day swirled in his head, but he had trained himself to put aside things he could do nothing about, and the sound of the rain still pelting against the roof slowly swept him to sleep.
Lights shimmered in the darkness, tiny dots shifting like mouche à feu on a summer's night, blue and green.
"There are too many." A woman's voice, low and husky. "More than before."
"That was always a risk. That was always the risk."
If the woman's voice was vaguely familiar, Gabriel would have known the man's voice on his deathbed. Isobel's 'boss’, the Master of the Territory.
"Can you stop them?" The woman again, and Gabriel could almost see her, tall and slender, hair silver as a coin under lamplight. Marie, that was who, the Right Hand to Isobel's Left.
"You can damn a river, divert its flow, but you cannot stop it. This is what was always going to happen, Marie. The only question was when. And now we have the answer."
"Then the Territory is doomed."
"The Territory was always doomed, as it was. Nothing remains, when water has its way. So now we will see what comes."
"And Isobel? And us?"
A low chuckle, and the faint flickerthwack of cards being shuffled. "We do what we have always done. Change is not the end; doom is not disaster."
There was a distinctly feminine sigh, then the clink of glasses. "You're very annoying."
A door opened, then closed.
"Doom is not disaster," the devil said again, and Gabriel knew, somehow, that he was speaking directly to him. "The river runs, the mountains rise and fall, the winds shatter, and the bones... the bones remain. Remember that. The bones remain."
"Gabriel!"
Brother Zacarías was far too cheerful, and far too loud. Gabriel groaned, draping his arm over his eyes as though that could block the other man's voice out.
"It's well past dawn, Gabriel. Arise!"
"I'm not one of your initiates, to need morning prayers and soul-scouring," he muttered, but threw back the blanket and sat up carefully, remembering the low ceiling overhead and sudden drop to his left. His body ached, but nowhere near as much as it would have sleeping on the ground, in the rain, and for that he was willing to be thankful.
"There's coffee and fresh bread waiting," the monk called up, and then there was the sound of the door opening and shutting again behind him.
Gabriel rubbed a hand over his face, feeling the rough bristles on his chin and cheeks. "And hot water for shaving, hopefully." He didn't mind looking a vagabond on the Road, but in civilized quarters it was best to look civilized, as much as he could.
He pulled on his clothes and boots and slid down the ladder, noting this morning the details he'd missed the night before: the smoothness of the wood under his hands, the evenness of the rungs, and how carefully it was set into the wall with metal pegs. They were careful with details, here in Rabbit's Mound.
Someone had brought in a fresh fodder for Steady while he slept—Zacarías, or someone else—and the horse was munching his way through it as though he'd never been stabled anywhere else.
"Don't get too used to it," he warned the horse. "We're back on the Road soon."
Steady flicked one ear dismissively and continued chewing.
Seen in daylight, under a clouded-over sky, Rabbit's Mound did not look like any town he'd seen, either in the Territory or the States. The baker's dozen of houses were all small, solidly built of baked clay, with rounded corners and flat roofs, and seemed to have been scattered like a handful of grain rather than placed in any logical pattern. Not even the hunting camps he'd visited had been this... random. That seemed at odds with the details he had noted with the ladder, and the way Henry had spoken about the town’ founding.
A handful of chickens pecked their way along a path, seemingly unconcerned by the human walking toward them. In the near distance he could hear voices calling, interspersed by the sharp barks of dogs, and beneath that the mutter of livestock being herded out for the day. He winced, imagining what sort of draw the animals must be for everything from coyote to Reaper hawks, and hoped their pens were well-guarded, and their shepherds well-armed.
A woman came out of one of the houses, a rope basket balanced on her hip and a floppy cloth hat perched on her head. She saw him and raised her free hand in greeting, then walked between two houses and out of sight.
"In here."
The voice came from behind him, and he turned to see Zacarías standing outside the main hall. "If you stand out there like a cow, someone will come by and milk you," the monk warned. "Come inside!"
Where the night before the hall had been crowded, this morning it was nearly empty, the tables bare and clean, the fire-pit cool, the ashes from the night before swept into a neat corner at the edge. But the kitchen was clearly still in use, from the clatter and crash he could hear from beyond the arched doorway.
"Too much went undone yesterday, because of the rains," the monk said, leading Gabriel to a table where two tin mugs waited, curls of steam rising from within. "And a few roofs were discovered to be in need of repair. I don't suppose you have any skills in that direction?"
"None whatsoever," Gabriel admitted, taking a sip of the sweetly bitter brew. It wasn't bad, although after a year of drinking Isobel's attempts at campfire coffee, his standards were no longer high. "But I'm willing to do what I can to help, in exchange for last night's boarding." He would have offered coin, but he had little left, and suspected they had little use for it out here.
Zacarías grinned, the change of expression making him look far younger than his years. "How are you at cleaning dishes?"
Which was how, after the promised breakfast of bread and surprisingly spicy sausage and greens, Gabriel found himself standing at a deep tub, dipping plates and cups into the water to rinse, and then handing them to a skinny, brown-haired girl to dry.
The girl looked at him sideways, then stared back intently at the towel in her hands. "Where you from?"
"I’ve been all over, but I was born in the North."
"Where it snows all the time?" She sounded as though she doubted that it did, in fact, snow at all, much less all the time.
"Not all the time, but... yes, it gets very cold and snowy in the winter."
"And there are bears?"
Gabriel felt his lip twitch and repressed it sternly. "Many bears."
"We got coyotes," she said, in the tone of someone confiding a secret. "Big ones. They'll take a sheep, iffin' we don't watch out."
"Is that so?"
"Mmmhmmm."
He tried to imagine Isobel at this age and found it surprisingly easy. She would have been just as serious-eyed, just as certain of herself. Doubts wouldn't come until later.
"I'd like to see a bear," the girl said.
"Maybe someday you will," he said, and handed her the last dish.
"But not until you are older, Mercy." Zacarías had left them to do their work but returned with suspicious timing just as they finished up. "Now, go, it's time for school."
Gabriel wiped his hands on the towel, and nodded in response to Mercy's hurried farewell, then raised an eyebrow at the monk.
"She's only eleven," Zacarías said. "Please do not fill her head with too many stories of the Road."
Gabriel laughed and shook his head. "Eleven's just the right age to start dreaming. But it's not for everyone." He'd not wanted it, himself. Not until he came back, and it had been his only option.
The monk tilted his head sideways, and in the reflecting sunlight from the open door Gabriel could see where the hair on the top of his head was shorter than the rest, his tonsure still growing in. "She has a gift for soothing those in pain. We have hopes of apprenticing her to Joseph, our chirurgeon, or a medicine woman, not lose her to wandering the Dust Roads."
The asperity in his tone startled a laugh out of Gabriel. "Take off that robe, lose the accent, there's not a thing separating you from Territory-born."
"There is part of me that is offended by that," Zacarías said. "But... I did choose to remain."
Gabriel folded the abandoned dishtowel over the sink's edge to dry, and crossed his arms, leaning against the wall. "Why did you? Last we saw of your folk, you were heading back over the Knife, disgusted by the ways and mores of us dissolute Territory folk. And yet, here you are. Don't tell me you thought you could save the souls of the Territory all by yourself?"
Zacarías affected a most pious expression, folding his hands together as though in prayer. "I would not be by myself, but the Lord, whose words I carry."
"Mmmm." Gabriel put all his skepticism into that single noise.
"And," Zacarías admitted, dropping his hands, "there may have been a suspicion that the Crown would not be pleased with us when we returned. While the Church protects her own, that protection is not absolute."
Considering the monks had entered the Territory without formal permission, seeking to put an end to the spell their king had ordered loosed on the Territory, Gabriel didn't doubt that there would be cause for concern.
"And your brothers?" The ones who had survived the beast, anyway.
"They..." Zacarías sighed, and shrugged, lifting his hands as though to disavow all responsibility for his former companions. "They had more faith than I. Or more foolishness. They are often two flips of the same coin, you say?"
"Sides. Two sides of the same coin."
"Ah. They returned home, and I did not. And perhaps it was God's will, after all. That I remain here, and share my faith with those who will listen, in their times of doubt and need. Just as it was God's will that we meet with you and young Isobel, to jointly finish what was needed against that hellspawn beast. And now we are together again, and perhaps there is a reason for that as well." He paused. "You scoff? Do you not believe in fate, Gabriel?"
"I really don't." Not the fate Zacarías spoke of, anyway. "But you do?"
"God works in mysterious ways, and it is not for the likes of us to question, merely obey."
Gabriel suspected his expression said what he thought of that, saving him from the rudeness of saying it. But Zacarías smiled gently, as though he’d expected nothing else from Gabriel, and was not offended.
"And your devil, he does not care that I speak of God."
"He really doesn't," Gabriel agreed to that without hesitation. The Old Man didn't care about much of anything folk did, so long as they stayed out of his hair, and didn't cause a fuss he had to deal with—or send his Hand to deal with. "You know he’s not actually the devil, right?"
Zacarías gave him an odd look. "The Church is aware of that fact, yes. But he lays claim to the title and offers no other. It is not comfortable to speak, but how else does one call him?"
"Isobel calls him the boss, but I guess that won’t work for you, no?"
Zacarías shook his head, that gentle smile back on his lips.
"Master of the Territory’s much of a mouthful, and not accurate, either. I suppose devil will have to do."
Zacarías dipped a hand into the pocket of his robe, and drew out a delicate rope of beads, the sigil of the hanging man dangling from the end. He draped it over one palm, letting his thumb run over the beads, one by one. "It seems to me, after longer acquaintance, that the Territory is a beautiful, but very strange place."
Gabriel rubbed a hand over his jaw, reminded that he’d wanted a shave. "It really is."
Suddenly tiring of their tete-a-tete, he closed his eyes briefly, then opened them to look the other man square in the face, watching not his expression, but the movement of his eyes. "Why did Henry bring me here, Zacarías?"
The monk's face was innocent as a lamb, but his lids flickered, dark brown eyes widening just a hair, and the motion of his thumb on the bead stopped. "I do not know what you mean."
"Men of God should be better liars. I could tell he was with me on the Road before he said anything. He watched me before he spoke up, probably for a while." While the old man put up a decent façade of Unexpected Rescuer, the details didn’t add up, for Gabriel, least of all the question of why had Henry been out in that storm at all? He hadn't been hunting, hadn't been traveling... there had been no sane reason to be there, save one: that he was looking for something. Or someone.
"He could have let me go, could have stayed quiet and I'd have ridden right by, but he didn't. And he brought me here, where you don't have so much as a guest-house to spare, and based on what I’ve seen, you barely scrape enough to feed your own.
"And then you being here?" Gabriel didn't give the monk time to form a protest. “The Territory’s not infinite, but it’s plenty large, and yet of all everywhere, you’re here." He lifted a hand, and began ticking instances off, one per finger. "So we've a man who just happens to be out in the pouring rain, when sane folk are home safe and dry. And that man just happens to find a stranger, who is plucked off the Road and offered hospitality, despite the town being shadowed by bandits. Fair enough; some folk are that kind, I’ll grant you. But in that town, it just happens is another man who knows this stranger, and his connection to the Devil's Hand, if not the devil himself."
Gabriel looked at his fingers, then closed them back into his palm.
"Coincidences happen, but, as Isobel often reminded me, the devil doesn't believe in coincidences. Says it's just bad luck we're paying attention to. And I'm thinking that bad luck is mine.
"So, tell me; why did Henry bring me here? If you were looking for Isobel, she and I don't ride together any more. She's finished her mentorship, she's out on her own now."
Zacarías looked back into the main hall as though hoping for someone to come rescue him, but the few people who had been there earlier had gone off while Gabriel was washing dishes. They could hear voices outside, rising and falling as they went about their business, but Zacarías made no attempt to summon any of them.
The monk’s shoulders lifted slightly, as though to shrug, then fell again, and he tucked the wooden beads back into his pocket. "In truth, Gabriel, we did not look for you. Nor the dama Isobel, although her presence would have been.... Well." The monk gave another delicate shrug. "It was not to be."
Gabriel didn't want to get into another discussion of fate. "But Henry was out there looking for someone. Something?"
"Someone. Anyone. And not only Henry, though he was the one to find you. And not only that night. For many days now, looking. Hoping.
"You have seen the village. It is not small, but we are farmers, craftsmen, families, not soldiers. And we are isolated."
Gabriel was beginning to understand. "And the bandits have been circling."
"Sí. Closer and closer, like a zopilote in the sky, circling a thing that is dying, not quite ready to swoop, but biding its time, knowing that its prey cannot outrun death."
Bandits, generally, were part of the risks of living in the Territory. You’d get one or two thinking the Road was their trough, and the occasional group setting up shop somewhere, feeding off the locals. So long as they left the native tribes alone, the devil didn't seem to particularly care, leaving them to Road Marshals to clear out as needed. But marshals were few and far between; Gabriel couldn't remember the last time he'd encountered one on the Road, and the last badgehouse had been…. a long while back. Nearest marshal he knew of was Rafe, back in Red Stick. But Rafe’d set down his badge and not seemed happy to pick it up again even for trouble in his own town.
Thoughts of marshals brought a remembrance of the tree that had grown seemingly overnight, the silhouette of it against the sky so like their sigil.
Gabriel wanted to say he didn’t believe in signs or portent, but he wasn’t a liar. But that didn’t mean he had to listen to them.
"You're looking for protection? Against an entire camp?" He thought of the woman he'd encountered, her calm self-assurance, the way she'd determined that he was neither threat nor profitable target. "You'd be better off making a deal with them for the water."
Zacarías rolled his eyes to the heavens, then gestured with one hand for Gabriel to follow him, walking from the kitchen back into the main hall. There were two old women sitting at the far end nearest the fireplace, spinning, but other than that it was now deserted. The clack clack clack of the drop-wheels was a half-forgotten sound from Gabriel’s childhood, and despite himself, some measure of tension in his body eased.
"That was my thought as well, when I came here," Zacarías admitted, taking a seat on one of the wooden benches. "That reasonable men should not fight over what could be shared. But these are not reasonable men, Gabriel. They refused an offer to meet and discuss, do not come to us with an offer themselves. They only come and watch, one at a time, for days at a time. Up on the ridge, just beyond the wards.
"They do not speak, they do not attack, but they wait, and they watch."
"Huh." That wasn’t the pattern for most bandits. They tended to be impatient bastards, quicker to swing or shoot than not. "How long’s this been going on?"
"Since before I came here. A year, a little more?"
"Watching, and not talking. It's making the town nervous. And nervous men do foolish things." Gabriel was impressed by the cunning behind it, though he did not voice that thought. He ignored the bench opposite Zacarías, instead paced the space between the tables, thinking out loud. "They want, but they can’t just take. Why?" He was thinking out loud to himself, not expecting the monk to answer. "If the well was blessed, likely that the entire town was, too. The wards, were they part of the original grant, Old John’s agreement with the locals?"
"I do not know."
"They're on good terms, so probably. Native wardings are different things, we learned that the hard way." In the snow-town of Andreas, where Isobel had come too close to dying. He shook off the memory, forcing himself to concentrate on the now. "Even if they aren't, I'm guessing the connection means there's a part of this town that's still tied to the local tribe. So they can't attack, not without breaking Agreement and risking the devil getting involved. But all they need is one of you to break, and they can claim that you were the ones who gave offense, that they had the right to respond."
The Agreement kept the Territory intact, despite the seemingly endless waves of settlers arriving every year; it taught the newcomers how to behave while they learned to survive. But like any law, you could bend it if you were smart enough, foolish enough. And maybe not today, maybe not next week, but eventually, someone in the town was going to do something foolish. That was just how people were.
He’d seen Isobel mediate a situation like this, keep it from getting worse. Well, not quite like this, but alike enough to be precedent. But he was no Hand to give and enforce judgement. Isobel was the one who should have been drawn to ride this way, not him.
"It's not a pleasant situation you've come to," he told the monk. "I wish you luck in figuring it out."